Dream jobs '10 special report

Once a struggling student, now he's a trainer of dragons at DreamWorks Animation. It's March 2007, and there's Jacob Melvin, a senior computer science major at the University of Colorado at Boulder. He's got a two-pointsomething grade point average, and he's barely hanging on in a required class. He's not worried about trying to land his dream job. He's worried about graduating.
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An unlikely automotive engineer oversees all the electricity at a revolutionary vehicle start-up. Even after working on the thing for years, Brian Gallagher can't forget how astounding the sight of an Aptera in the wild can be. When one came barreling toward him and his wife recently, he says, he yelled just as loudly as she did. "It was shocking."
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He tracks the weird and vivid bursts of lightning from erupting volcanoes. Late one night last March, the icy peak of Mount Redoubt in south central Alaska erupted, sending thick plumes of ash and steam more than 10 000 meters into the air. It was a nightmare for local residents and pilots but a dream come true for Ronald Thomas.
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At Yamaha she creates the digital pianos of the future. The gleaming grand piano looks like others I've seen. But with utmost politeness, Hiroko Ohmura informs me that I'm mistaken. With that, she attacks the keys, and the notes of Beethoven's Sonata No. 8 in C minor, the famed "Pathetique," fill the vast auditorium. I'm entranced. When she's finished, she points inside the ebony cabinet: There ar...
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He brings the hacker ethic and Internet access to the far corners of the globe. He attained geek immortality by coinventing the Sol-­20 personal computer in the mid-­1970s. He was a key member of the legendary Homebrew Computer Club and a recurring character in Steven Levy's 1984 book, Hackers. So you'd think that nowadays Bob Marsh might be tripping the light fantastic like fellow personal-­compu...
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His adventure flights over rough mountains yield stunningly accurate maps. Rick Armstrong is snuggled up with a laptop in the cluttered space that was once the backseat of a six-­ passenger Cessna 206. Twenty-­five hundred meters below, sun-­splashed Portland, Ore., slowly dissolves into the Tolkienesque foothills of Mount Hood. It's some beautiful scenery. But right now, Armstrong's eyes are fixe...
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